Space is far, big, ever-expanding, and mysterious. Think about all the things you know about space and the existence of life and the galaxy; it’s all a hypothesis.
There is always logic to support those hypotheses, but there is no hard evidence, and it is highly unlikely that we will ever know what really happened.
Having said that, that hypothesis has at least some explanation and a few shreds of evidence as well.
10 Unsolved Space Mysteries
The whole universe is shaped by all sorts of unseen forces that we don’t fully understand or know at all.
From dark matter to multiverse, let us see 10 mysteries that bamboozled the greatest minds. It is time to dive into a world in which truth is stranger than fiction.
1. The Great Attractor
Space is moving along with our galaxy, and it is unknown why. It is thought that the reason could be because of a supercluster.
It is suggested that its mass is millions of times more than the Milky Way.
Everything is attracted to it, but unfortunately, we cannot see it as it is on the other side of the Milky Way.
The Great Attractor is mysterious because it lies in the “Zone of Avoidance,” where there is so much gas and dust we cannot see in the visible spectrum.
We can, however, see our own galaxy and other close galaxies moving towards the great attractor.
This means it is something massive that could be unfamiliar, unexpected, and phenomenal.
2. Dark energy
When you hear about dark energy, evil powers might come to your mind.
But dark energy is something entirely different in the real world, probably the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe.
Scientists predict that about 68% of all the matter in the universe is made up of dark energy, and we do not know how it works or what effects it has.
Dark Energy has the ability to exert a negative pressure which is opposite to that of gravity.
Dark energy has been confirmed to exist from scientific data and the observation of the expansion rate and its acceleration made is based on Hubble law.
The existence of dark energy is proven, and the fact that we know absolutely nothing about it shows how much mysterious it is.
3. Dark Matter – The Spider’s Web
Of all the observable things we can see today like asteroids, planets, satellites, and stars, galaxies make up about 5% of the universe.
So, interestingly we only know 5% of what exists in this vast universe.
But a strange substance called dark matter is present; we cannot see or understand it, but it exists. As common humans, we can do nothing but accept this fact.
They cover almost 25% of the total universe, and it acts like a spider’s web, which holds fast-moving galaxies together.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy
The universe about which we know nothing appears to be made of dark energy and dark matter.
Dark energy covers about 68%, which repels gravity, while Dark matter covers 25%, which holds fast-moving galaxies.
4. Supervoid
The supervoid sounds very scary and lonely. It is basically a gigantic space with nothing in it at all.
There are galaxies in the supervoids but they take a negligible space. Now imagine how huge the supervoids can be.
These areas are not normal as it has a very low density of galaxies. “Boötes void” is one of that supervoid that contains about 60 galaxies visible to us.
This doesn’t seem that scary, but when you find out that an average zone with a similar size should contain 10,000 galaxies, it surely brings chills to your spine. It has a radius of 165 million light-years but is 700 million light-years away from Earth.
Another void called “The Eridanus Void” is about 1 billion light-years in diameter, and it consists of absolutely nothing.
There are some theories about its formation, but there is no real definitive answer yet to explain the inconsistencies.
5. Cold Spot
It is called the cold spot as it serves the name.
It is a cool region in the background radiation that has existed after the big bang throughout the universe. It seems very unusual, but it exists.
The radiation blanket is full of temperature variation. The blanket is called cosmic microwave background.
It remains a mystery to scientists because they cannot explain why one spot is consistently colder than its surroundings.
6. The Oh-My-God Particle
Please don’t be confused with the “God Particle,” aka Higgs Boson
The Oh my god particle was a cosmic ray that was of ultra-high energy. It was the highest-energy cosmic ray that had ever been observed back in the day.
It was traveling and got destroyed by the Earth’s atmosphere.
The crazy thing was that it had the kinetic energy of 48 joules. One particle having that much energy is insane.
How this particle was accelerating with such velocity cannot be comprehended. It is next to impossible. We do not know how it was produced and what kind of event could have produced it.
A few more similar energies have been found in the last decades, but we cannot comprehend what it is all about.
It is very mysterious and interesting as it is of a different magnitude, something we cannot even imagine.
To give context, it should have been moving 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light to attain that sort of energy level.
7. Space Roar
Another thing that seems utterly scary about space is the Space Roar. They are also called Silent Scream as no one can hear you scream in space, right? That makes if scarier.
There is no medium for sound to travel through as space is a vacuum. As a result, there should be no noise, and yet there is.
The whole universe and its entities exist, producing sound. We cannot listen to them from here on earth, but they are detected through radio signals throughout space.
It is so loud that the noise drowns other signals, which affects the scientists and their work to explore the cosmos.
You might be curious where these roars are coming from, and some think the leftover radiation produced from early stars.
Some believe it is the sound of gasses swirling around the galaxy. For now, the roaring sound remains a noisy mystery.
8. How Big is the Universe?
The Universe is massive and likely to be infinite.
However, the observable universe is about 93- light-years across. No one knows how big the universe is but something we know is that the universe is expanding.
You might be curious about when the expansion will stop, but the expansion doesn’t need to stop.
Due to the expansion, space is being created, and the gap between everything is increasing. You have to be very careful not to mix up the universe and the observable universe.
This is a mystery as we don’t know how far it can go and also what is being engulfed as space.
The universe is roughly 14 billion years old.
Let’s assume the universe to be roughly spherical to make it simple.
Now to calculate the area, if you multiply 14 billion times the number of kilometers in a light-year (5.87849981 × 1012), we get 1.33847×1023 KM, roughly 13384700000000000000000 KM in diameter.
If we calculate the area of a sphere (4πr2) with that diameter, we get 2.2512677×1047 KM2.
This is only calculated assuming the universe to be spherical and 14 billion years old.
It could be of a different shape and older, but you understand the basic concept.
The universe is mysterious and unknown and so large that it is beyond the sense of human beings.
9. Are We Alone?
In the universe, there are around 1024 living stars. It is highly unlikely that life would develop on only one planet.
We can claim that we may be alone only because we haven’t searched everywhere yet, and humans only can send radio signals for a few hundred light-years or even less.
The universe, meanwhile, has existed for 14 billion years and we might have missed the extension of other civilizations, or we haven’t reached them yet, or they are in a developing phase.
It is also possible that we are the most intelligent and diverse planet. It is improbable to meet other intelligent life at the same time as us.
Furthermore, it could be present, but we mostly look for habitable planets and materials that life on earth is accustomed to, but extraterrestrial life could survive on other basic elements. Hence, we are not sure if we’re alone or not.
10. What actually is in the black hole?
The black hole is not necessarily a hole, but it is a very densely packed mass and energy with gravity so intense that nothing can escape it.
It is because the escape velocity of the black hole exceeds the speed of light.
Nothing can exceed that speed, so nothing escapes.
Inside it is supposed to be just space until you hit the physical substance of the black hole itself, which is a dense clump of mass only.
We cannot see what’s inside as light does not reflect from it, and neither does any radiation get emitted from it.
Because of this, what actually is there cannot be found out, and explaining it is beyond the understanding of quantum physics.